


MORGUE FILE: ghostie who steve wants to fuck the mostie

by silentwalrus



Series: MORGUE FILES [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Creepy stuff, IT IS UNFINISHED AND HEAVILY FRAGMENTED, M/M, THIS IS A MORGUE FILE, kinda sorta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 18:36:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12371646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: THIS IS A MORGUE FILE. It is unfinished and heavily fragmented. Premise: CATWS, except Bucky is a ghost/has ghostlike qualities/powers whatever. This was written AGES ago and is probably about as coherent as a keysmash. Enjoy?





	MORGUE FILE: ghostie who steve wants to fuck the mostie

“He’s a ghost, Rogers,” Natasha says. “You’ll never find him.”

Steve remembers, after, that she was right. They had no idea how right she was.

 

Two weeks after Steve comes out of the ice—after the barrage of tests and the crash-course catastrophe that was fifty different government agents giving him a fast and dirty rundown on the past seventy years—Steve is lying awake in his new apartment on his new bed in his new pajamas, none of which he bought for himself.

The clock beside him reads 3:49 AM. He’s been watching the brightly-glowing numbers tick over since 8:12PM. He didn’t buy the clock either. It probably does something else—there are a lot of buttons on its sleek black surface—but Steve is not even remotely interested in testing any of them.

3:50AM. 3:52AM. It’s not the first night Steve’s spent watching the countdown. Probably won’t be the last.

3:53AM. Across the apartment, Steve’s phone rings.

The phone is new, SHIELD issue, a slim black rectangle that Steve never remembers to charge. He’s twice had agents knock on his door, asking if he would please turn his phone on, sir, it’s best for everyone if you can be contacted if necessary. Steve can’t actually remember if he touched the thing in the past three days, but the only people who have his number are SHIELD-employed and nobody calls at four in the morning just to chat. He pads over to the kitchen table and picks up. “Rogers.”

There’s no answer. Steve waits a couple seconds and tries again. “Hello?”

Nothing. Steve’s about to hang up when static crackles and a shuddery breath sounds down the line. Steve frowns. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

Static hisses, like the call is coming from a long way away. At first Steve can’t quite make out the sounds, but abruptly they sharpen: “—three two—five five—seven—zero—thre—”

Steve drops the phone. Bucky keeps talking, he can hear him, he can hear him, he scrambles for the phone—“Bucky? Bucky!”

The line goes silent. Then Bucky screams, agony, terror, the line crackling like a live wire as Steve gasps and nearly drops it again, where is he, he needs him, “Bucky—Bucky—”

The line goes dead.

Steve stands, panting, in the alien sprawl of the apartment, the phone cracked in three pieces in his hand. He stands for a long time. He hasn’t slept in thirteen days. Strange things happen when people don’t sleep. They hear things, see things. Hallucinations.

He slams his feet into shoes, grabs his keys, and blows out the door. He knows a gym that’s open all night and doesn’t care about mauled punching bags so long as he reimburses them after.

Fury finds him there, punching the shit out of the bag like he can get it all out of his head, and the next day the Avengers start happening to Captain America. Strange things happen when you don’t sleep. First there are aliens, and magic, and then there are missions, missions, missions. Steve puts it out of his head.

 

///break 

 

Steve is suddenly cold, cold as he’s ever been, the kind of Arctic cold that numbs blood and stops hearts for years and years. His breath puffs white in front of him; frost is creeping across the ground.

 

///break 

 

When Steve looks up at the mirror again, Bucky’s standing right behind him.

Steve whirls. There’s nobody there. He rounds on the mirror again, panting, a whine like cutting glass building at the edge of hearing—

The mirror explodes outwards. Shards fly like shrapnel, slamming into the wall behind Steve. He throws his arms up on reflex, protecting his face, expecting the hot sting of tearing skin, expecting to get his forearms shredded—

—but it doesn’t come.

When Steve lowers his arms, slow, he sees the mirror is completely destroyed, nothing but miniscule fragments left clinging around the frame. He turns: the glass shrapnel is embedded in a perfect outline of his body on the wall. It even passed through the gap made by his arms between his head and his shoulder. Not a single scrap of glass touched him.

Natasha and Sam both slam into the bathroom seconds after each other, both with their guns out. They find Steve still staring at the bizarre mural on the wall. “What the fuck,” Sam says.

“I didn’t imagine that,” Steve says, still staring at the shards of mirror. He feels numb. “You both see that. It happened.”

“Steve,” Natasha says carefully. “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on.”

“It’s Bucky,” Steve says. None of the mirror fragments are bigger than his pinky finger. Almost all of them are driven so deep into the plaster that only the ridged spurs of their edges stick out. “Remember when you said he was a ghost?”

“Okay,” Sam says. “Alright. Okay. Look. We know he has a physical, corporeal body. Dude kicked me off a helicarrier. Shit, I kicked him. In the head. So.”

“It might not be him,” Natasha says grimly.

“That was definitely Bucky,” Steve says immediately, because live, dead, undead, possessed, Steve fucking knows Bucky.

Natasha shuts her eyes briefly. “Look. Who do we know that likes to use illusions, mind control, and magic to fuck with people?”

Steve grimaces. “Loki’s in Asgard.”

“Is he? And even if he is, who knows how magic works? Astral projection, lingering influence, some kind of link—we don’t know, Steve. The point is, we don’t know.”

“He called me,” Steve says, cutting off whatever Sam was about to say. “Before Manhattan. Middle of the night, my phone rang. It was him. He was—” Steve stops.

“Steve,” Natasha says.

“There was no record of the call the next day,” Steve says. “That—that night, Fury came to me, told me about the Avengers Initiative. And—the next day, Loki happened.”

“That doesn’t actually discredit the Loki theory,” Natasha says tensely. “The opposite, in fact.”

“Why would Loki do that?” Steve counters. “More importantly, how? What Loki knew, his intel, he took from the people he’d mind controlled, and I hadn’t—hell, I hadn’t even talked to my therapists about Bucky, and the whole world still thinks we were just friends—how would Loki know?”

 

////break

 

Steve swallows. “I think Bucky was trying to warn me. About the Tesseract.”

 

“If you’re right, that he was trying to warn you,” Sam says slowly. “Then what’s he trying to warn you about now?”

 

  
“Steve,” Sam says, but Steve already knows; he can see his breath in the air.

“He’s here,” Steve says.

Every phone in the room starts ringing. Sam startles; Natasha has her guns out. Steve fumbles his phone, picks up. “Bucky?”

Wet, stuttering breathing on the line. “James… Buchanan. Barnes. James—Buchanan—”

“Yeah, Bucky, yeah, that’s you,” Steve could cry, with relief, with nerves, with whatever else—he doesn’t know.

Behind Natasha, the TV flicks on. White static. Steve can see frost climbing across the window. “You’re my mission,” Bucky whispers in Steve’s ear.

Steve grits his teeth. “You’re my friend,” he says, raw. “I love you. Please come back to me. Please.”

Across from him, Natasha’s eyes snap wide and her guns are suddenly pointing at Steve’s head. No: behind him. “Steve,” she says, her voice tight with something like terror. Sam has his gun leveled now too, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around.

Steve doesn’t turn around. He can feel Bucky’s hand on the back of his neck: arctic cold. “Hey, Buck,” he says. His heart is hammering but he feels eerily calm. It’s Bucky. “I missed you.”

“’Til the end of the line,” Bucky whispers, and everything goes black.

 

ANYWAY THE ACTUALLY ENDING IS LIKE. BUCKY USING HIS GHOSTISH POWERS TO FUCK WITH TONY OR SOMETHING  
“U LOVED ME WHEN I WAS A CRIPPLED DISEASE VECTOR, I LOVE U WHEN U ARE AN ELDRITCH ABOMINATION FROM THE VOID BETWEEN WORLDS” STEVE YELLS  
“U VOWED THRU SICKNESS AND HEALTH, NOT PARANORMAL ACTIVITY AND DEATH,” BUCKY YELLS  
And then they k*ss etc etc the end

**Author's Note:**

> I'm probably missing tags; pls lmk if u think anything particular should be tagged here!


End file.
